


To heal a daemon

by andarecord



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Character Study, Gen, His Dark Materials Inspired, Pre-PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics, PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:21:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22093246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andarecord/pseuds/andarecord
Summary: 94 days until Pyeongchang.Yuzuru breaks, and heals.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	To heal a daemon

**Author's Note:**

> It's taken almost two years to write this fic, most of which was written in the raw stage of processing all that happened and was witnessed in 2017-18 Olympic season. This is **all fictional**. Many factual events referenced did happen - please see endnotes - but all interpretation is my own and not meant to speak for or on behalf of any people referenced. Some guesswork has been done regarding timelines but they're broadly correct. 
> 
> Creative liberties have been taken with the daemon AU to make it work in the figure skating context. Humans and daemons can be apart from each other a bit more and daemons required to stay on the sidelines within the limits of the boards or on the boards when their skater performs. We will assume the world has been constructed to account for larger daemons.

**Figure skating: Injured Hanyu pulls out of NHK Trophy**

[KYODO NEWS](https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2017/11/0c3c3ac5eebe-update1-figure-skating-injured-hanyu-to-pull-out-of-nhk-trophy.html) \- Nov 10, 2017 - 18:00 | Sports, All

_Defending world and Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu, who sustained injuries to his right ankle ligament during official practice, withdrew from the NHK Trophy figure skating competition that got under way Friday, the Japan Skating Federation said._

_Hanyu, who had been looking to complete a three-peat and fourth overall win in the men's contest of the ISU Grand Prix event, fell while attempting a quad lutz at Osaka Municipal Central Gymnasium a day earlier and missed Friday morning's training session._

_"Unfortunately, I will have to withdraw due to the doctor's final decision," the 22-year-old said in a statement. "I will concentrate on undergoing treatment and will work toward the national championships," he added, referring to the domestic competition scheduled on Dec. 21-24 in Chofu, western Tokyo._

\---

His mother’s daemon curls up in her lap on the silent van ride to the doctor’s instead of attempting to comfort Shiori and for that, Yuzuru is grateful. 

He has his arm on the armrest next to her perch, a finger rested against the coolness of her talons like a lifeline to cling on through the roar in his head, and he knows even that is almost too much for her right now. He forces himself to stare out the tinted window, at the blur of highway guard rails and road signage, forces himself to think of something, anything other than the sea of eager reporters and camera flashes, the worried flashes of fans’ faces, _the practice you should be at_ , his brain adds traitorously and Shiori twitches, her feathers ruffling as she grazes his arm with her wing feathers in sharp rebuke. 

Yuzuru turns up the volume on his earphones. He should’ve brought the other pair that amplifies the bass notes most faithfully. He closes his eyes. Inhale, exhales. 

“Yes, we will contact you afterwards,” his mother is saying into the phone to one of the JSF reps. “Yes, a preliminary diagnosis first and then to Sendai for another—yes, understood. Goodbye.”

Sendai. His exhibit, the detour he was meant to take _after_ NHK, _after_ the Lutz. Why is he thinking in past tense already? The ankle may still hold. It _will_ hold. He needs to call Tracy. He needs to adjust his layout but Autumn Classic will suffice for the short at least and he could take out a quad in the free. He needs Brian. But Brian’s still in hospital. But the American journalists would have heard by now. The media will want a statement. He needs to—

“I need to call Ghislain” Yuzuru says, into the silence of the car. “He said he talked to the ISU rep and it’s okay to miss all the practices, it won’t affect your eligibility for the competition. And Yoshiko-san said that you can be reinstated with 5 hours notice even if you” - his voice, the traitor, cracks - “withdraw, so we just need to make sure we meet that deadline—“

He hasn’t raised his voice at all but Omoikane raises his white fox head from behind his tail and stares at him with a familiar, scrutinising gaze, and his words come to a halt, replaced by the sound of his heartbeat thudding in his ears. His ankle twinges, a fresh wave of pain and he resists the urge to reach out and feel the swelling, throbbing heat of the joint. Touching makes it real, and that’s not allowed, not yet, not _this_ soon after—

“No Yuzuru,” his mother says, gentle but firm. “Just rest for now.”

\---

It’s real. It’s reality, embodied in two x-rays that seem way too neat to have caused the wreckage of carefully built visions of his Olympic season now lying at his feet. 

Shiori flutters to his shoulders and into the familiar carrier they give him to wear, adjusting her balance to his new centre of gravity with well-practised ease and Yuzuru finds himself noticing the hand grips on this pair are more comfortable than the others. The part of him that isn’t still floating somewhere both above his head and stuck in his throat wants to laugh. 

She stays by his side, silent and inscrutable, as he and Ghislain and the JSF rep fill out paperwork confirming his withdrawal, and through the short meetings he has with Shirota-san, the ANA reps and the NHK producers, apologising for said withdrawal. They receive the news with a worried, understanding resignation that somehow makes it worse. 

Ghislain gives him a hug, promising to call Brian. Yuzuru smiles at him and bows like usual, but something of the careening feeling inside must show in his face because Ghislain’s daemon, a small, good natured sun bear who is used to playfully nudging Shiori with her snout as she flutters around him during practice, doesn’t attempt to approach her. 

“It’ll be okay,” Ghislain says gruffly and a part of Yuzuru hates the unfamiliar lines of worry newly etched on his face. Ghislain doesn’t have the sort of face for frown lines, only uproarious laughter. “We’ll figure this out. Just focus on resting.”

Thankfully they’ve managed to wrangle only a single interview with NHK and he bears the force of the interviewer’s sympathy and the wide-eyed scrutiny of her possum daemon before retreating to the safety of his hotel room. 

His mother is out getting dinner and - a part of Yuzuru knows - giving him space. He replies to his father and sister’s worried texts, sends a quick one - ‘I’m withdrawing, I’ve confirmed it’ - to Shirota-san, who will know what to do with them. Ghislain has sent him a bunch of updates and his English comprehension is just enough to make out that he’s holding the fort down with foreign media.

Kikuchi-san has texted him instructions for stretches to do without disturbing his ankle and he does those, while systematically switching off his phone notifications. His thumb hovers over his MP3 player for ages, unable to press down or make a selection. The sun has slipped below the horizon and the night looms, dark and endless. 

At 6pm, Shiori flutters down from her perch and switches on the TV with a jab of her beak to the familiar sound of NHK Trophy music.

“Don’t,” Yuzuru says. His appetite has deserted him sometime yesterday and shows no signs of returning. His eyes are dry, and burning. 

Shiori fixes him with her usual steely predator’s gaze and makes no move to switch the TV off. She’s burning too but with a different energy, an anger that vibrates off her like heat, tangible, familiar. 

“It’s not fair,” she says. 

Yuzuru sighs. “I know.”

He watches Satoko take to the ice. Nobu’s occasional updates of her condition last year had leaked periodically into their LINE conversation, tinged increasingly with worry at every additional complication as the season drew closer. 

From the distance, her daemon, with his white and black plumage, looks remarkably like Shiori and only a small flutter of his great wings betrays the line of tension he can see in Satoko’s jawline. Her daemon sits next to her on a perch, too big for her shoulder, as she waits for her scores in the Kiss and Cry. She does well, for mere months of training but he can read the disappointment in her shoulders, the self-recrimination on her face that is carefully - but not quite - hidden behind a mask of composure. Something in his gut wrenches at the sight, another when he watches Evgenia fall on her triple flip, to the sound of gasps from the crowd. The medical tape on her right leg is so visible he’s surprised there’s no commentary on the matter. 

He watches part of the men’s event, before Shiori makes enough agitated noises on her perch so he switches it off. Makes a mental note to thank Jason Brown next time 

\---

The doctors force him off the ice to rest for two weeks and he tears through the rehabilitation regime on the wisps of a promise that he'll be able to test the healing process on the ice if he sticks to it with military precision.

He knows his ankle isn’t ready - is far from ready - the moment he puts his feet into his skate boots but a stubborn part of him - the part that used to get harshest reprimands from Nanami-sensei, the part that steeled him against the press of bandages as the first notes of Phantom of the Opera played in a Shanghai ice rink - laces them up anyway. Shiori turns her head sharply at him as he yanks the final bit into place but he ignores her.

He gets through a glide on the ice and a handful of three turns when Tracy stops him, his name sharp on her tongue, her dog daemon letting out a bark as if emphasising a reprimand that doesn’t exist yet. “Are you feeling pain?” she asks, skating over, her eyes on his ankle, a frown creasing her brow. 

The stubborn part of Yuzuru - the part still trying to drown out the pangs of his ankle, the part frustrated with the slow, endless, repetitive drag of rehabilitation exercises - longs to shake his head. But the larger part of him is the one who survived last summer, the one who spent so many hours carving figures on the ice under Tracy’s patient eye, trying to summon the right angle for a turn that he used to do in his sleep. If he looks hard enough, he can still see the patterns he traced on TCC ice, carved under the epidermis like a tattoo. He can feel the hours she spent sitting with him, a pillar of calm in the bustle of rink training and then in the silence of the private sessions he retreated to, tied to the sound of his breathing, ragged only partly because of exertion. 

As if sensing this, she lays a hand on his arm, gentle like her voice when she says, “Yuzu, look at me.”

Yuzuru looks at her and sighs. “Yes.”

\---  
  


A time deduction costs Shoma the Grand Prix Final title. Not for the first time, Yuzuru envies Shoma his lizard daemon’s size, and her ability to hide so well from the scrutiny of the media scrum afterwards, only a tail visible from inside his collar to remind everyone of her presence. 

It was not an ideal competition for any of the skaters, but the part of his mind that Yuzuru knows he should quiet analyses it anyway, internally griping at the camera angles as he jots jump layout notes down. Outside, the sky lightens to morning. He’s never quite comprehended how much data is lost - even in the blur of focusing on one’s own skating - when you can’t hear your competitors’ landings, when you can’t see their trajectory in three dimensions. 

“His daemon’s nervous,” Shiori says sleepily. She is a sand colored coyote daemon standing closely at Nathan’s side, the lift of her head poised like a soldier at attention, but for the twitch of her tail. Trust Shiori to see it, amongst the press and scrum of media murmuring and restless reporters’ daemons flitting about. The apartment is quiet, save the low murmur of the Japanese commentators’ familiar voices. Everything feels distant, tinny, slightly removed. Yuzuru forces himself to concentrate on the press of his biro on notebook paper and breathes. Four counts in. Anything but the itchy, restless feeling coalescing in the burn of his ankle, newly iced and bandaged. 

“At least they get proper medals this time,” Shiori says, and he snorts loudly enough to wake his mother. 

\---

December comes with a flurry of snow-covered mornings and the quiet disappointment of missed deadlines he has to cross off his training notebook. His mother comes back from the Cricket Club with an entire trunk full of presents from fans, which takes an age to unload and he spends a good while looking through the notebooks, the gigantic _banner_ that he doesn’t know what to do with, but it’s the familiar smell of the ice rink and wood that Yuzuru misses, the itch to just glide. Shiori misses the rafters. 

He plans a session on the rehabilitation bicycle to write a text to Kobayashi-san withdrawing from Japanese Nationals, so he doesn’t have to sit in silence and face the fallout. The guilt feels like a wrench of a vice in his stomach and throat when he sends it off and watches it solidify into a green message bubble on LINE. No takebacks, no returns, a December of Canadian snow, another few early mornings watching the All Japan Nationals instead of taking part, and the whir of gym equipment. He’s not getting sick too this year. 

Shiori flutters her wings impatiently from where she’s perched and Yuzuru ignores the sudden twinge of pain that shoots up his ankle. He switches off the notifications on his phone, grits his teeth and goes back to work. 

He checks though. Of course he checks, in the haze of post-rehabilitation exhaustion and frustration and the response is both as he’s dreaded and expected; it’s horrible, depressingly hilarious and nauseatingly familiar all at once, a weird kind of awful to be watching his name jump up on Twitter and search rankings, the flood of well wishes always accompanied by the twinge of seeing blurry screenshots of photos he barely remembers being taken in NHK with his ankle circled in angry red and caustic words mixed in with the love -- _get better soon, we believe in you, cheater, we love you yuzu, inconsiderate, special treatment, prove you're injured!!, we’re always with you..._

  
Friends send him messages, Plushenko sends him a text that he can't bear to open. He copies and pastes his thanks robotically to as many as he can stand to skim and switches off his phone. 

He watches the All Japan Nationals in a fog of sleep deprivation. He clocks Shoma’s nerves, the pain of seeing Sota fighting so hard for his triples, seeing Keiji triumph and the relief as he drops his hands and raises his face to the sky, and thinks back to them at ten years old, playing around by the boards before a victory ceremony with something like pride. Satoko claws her way back to the top of the podium and he barely registers that he’s crying for her until he just is.

But Japanese Nationals are about Mura, and it’s the swooping gut-wrenching bittersweetness of it all that consumes him as he watches Mura take his final bow. 

Mura opens their phone call by asking him how he’s doing, with the simple ease of any everyday conversation. He doesn’t mention the weeks of missed messages, the lack of updates

“I’m sorry,” Yuzuru says simply, into the silence. 

“For what?” Mura says, patient. 

“For...everything.”

It’s their side by side triple axels that Yuzuru thinks of when he says this, the frustration of never being able to quite master the gravitas and power of Mura’s takeoff, the hours they spent drilling takeoffs to the sound of Mura’s father barking commands at them from the boards, the brightness of Mura’s pride the day Yuzuru had finally mastered the axis that was right for him; different but similar. If he closes his eyes, Yuzuru can still hear the sound of the empty ice rink in the late night, the sound of Mura drilling his jumps over and over on the ice.  
  


“None of it is your fault Yuzu.”

  
Mura’s never been a particularly talkative person, eternally the forbearing older brother to him and they sit for a long time in simple silence over the phone, the sound of his kids playing in the background. Somehow the sound of that, more than anything, feels like it’s Mura saying _it’s okay, I’ll be okay_. 

“You’ll be alright,” Mura says, eventually, gently, and Yuzuru hates that it feels like Mura’s the one comforting him. When it’s been four years of working towards those Olympic rings, and Mura still, Mura will never--

It’s not _fair_ , Shiori says, and it’s a moment before Yuzuru realizes he’s said it out loud. 

“Just be healthy for me,” Mura says, a note of familiar exasperation in his voice, accompanied by a roughness that wasn’t there before, a spark of fire. “I’m not gonna say anything stupid like skate for both of us. Just skate for yourself. Just _skate_.”

Yuzuru swallows down the lump in his throat. “I promise.”

\---

“You’re looking at three months minimum, one month off the ice completely,” the doctor says. His face has a gentleness that reminds Yuzuru, inexplicably, of his father, but it’s worn out and sympathetic and far too calm for the news he’s just dropped into their laps. “We’re still not sure why the new area is experiencing pain, it could be longer but we’ll know once we allow this sprain to heal.”

Yuzuru has no time for sympathy. But it still feels like sinking, feels like Shiori’s talons, itching to tear into something, and a jerk of bright pain along her left wing. 

His mother frowns. “What are our options?”

“Withdrawal,” the doctor says immediately, then recoils at - no doubt - the look on both their faces. He takes a breath and says haltingly, “You will have to speak with your Olympic committee, but there should be a list of legal painkillers allowed for the treatment of injuries. Bring them to me and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Painkillers,” Yuzuru rolls the word around on his tongue, bitter. 

“We will look into it,” his mother says firmly. Omoikane rises to his feet and waits for them by the door, ears alert, already with a million solutions that Yuzuru can _see_ whirling in his mother's mind. They're going to war. 

Yuzuru holds his arm out for Shiori and feels her wince as she flutters to him and quickly tucks her wing back in. He looks down at his feet, shifts his weight onto his right foot a bit more. A dull ache. He looks back at the doctor. “Is there a chance the daemon can also feel...pain?”

The doctor blinks. As does his owl daemon on her perch. “I-I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.”

\---

He takes them. Makes careful notes of when and where in his notebook, the precise doses, consults with his nutritionist about the optimal time to include them in his meal plan. 

The numbers are soothing. 

The way the numbness slowly spreads through his feet is not, but it’s worth it, to be back on TCC ice, staring up at the Olympic board. It’s like the pain in Shiori’s wings has substituted his own, but it feels like a dull ache somewhere deep inside him, acrid and impossible to reach. 

\---

His dreams that night are fitful bursts of colour and indistinct voices, the feeling of the earth rolling like waves, and ends with a sharp sensation of pain, a burst of light, too bright and searing. 

Shiori says “Yuzuru” and he snaps awake. 

For a moment, he’s sixteen and alone, disoriented and looking up into the dark, unfamiliar lines of Tsuzuki-sensei’s small extra bedroom in Kobe, crowded with storage cabinets. Yuzuru blinks and the lines resolve themselves into the familiar ceiling of his Canadian bedroom, but there’s a sharp pain in his chest that knocks the breath from his lungs and feels - awful, and familiar, like sinking, like the vast, still, cold air of a gymnasium. His breath is coming out as gasps now, his legs unsteady as he makes to get out of bed. 

“Yuzuru,” Shiori says again and he stumbles over to her, reaching out for her white and black speckled feathers like a lifeline. He knows even before he touches her - she’s hurt. 

Not the same place as the other time, a fracture along her radius bone. 

Shiori blinks up as the first of his tears reach the top of her head, and then nudges his hand with her head, gentle nip to his fingers. 

“I’m not dead,” she says gently. “Stop being a drama queen.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. 

“We’ve healed before,” Shiori says grimly. She doesn’t need to say that neither of them knew precisely _how_. She doesn’t need to tell him today’s the day they’re due to resume training. “We just need to do it again.”

His throat is tight, painful, a familiar prelude to tears or an attack. He digs his nail into his palm. Tries to shut down the wave of terror, its peaks battering down his defences. Three breaths in. Three breaths out. 

\---

“You need to tell your coaches,” his mother says gently, as he eventually calms down. She puts a gentle hand on his cheek, dabbing at his eyes with a cool cloth. Worried but indomitable, in the quiet, determined way of hers. It grounds him, in this whirling mass of _why_ echoing in his head. He gently picks Shiori up in his arms from where she's lying against Omoikane, cradling her as best he can without jostling the wing. 

“They can’t help,” Yuzuru says. Daemons don’t get injured. It’s not... _normal_ , and he doesn’t want to think about the possibility of seeing a blank lack of understanding on his coaches’ faces like the doctor’s or, worse, the shadow of revulsion. Daemons do not get injured and he doesn’t know what it means that Shiori has been twice now. He takes a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

He opens the door to the rink just as Javi crashes out of another quad Salchow and swears audibly enough that it rings through the rink, turns a bunch of heads. Xiomara lets out an audible growl, tossing her head in frustration. The chipmunk daemon of one of the junior skaters scrambles up a post in its hurry to get out of the way of Xiomara’s large pacing paws. 

He puts Shiori carefully onto the rafters as best as he can and just in time before Ghislain comes up to greet him. Tries to keep a smile on his face and prays his coaches don’t notice.

The practice is shit. His ankle feels leaden, detached from his body. He barely ekes out a waltz jump, can barely manage a spin and stumbles four times on his step sequence. There’s barely a month until the Olympics. Javi lands three quadruple Salchows in a row. 

He’s glad the glass windows stop his mother from hearing him curse, and checks discreetly that no other Japanese skater is on the ice. 

Brian banishes him to the sidelines so he can stand there and calm his breathing. 

“Good to see you back,” Javi says, skating over and clasping Yuzuru’s shoulder. 

“Bad skating,” Yuzuru laughs hollowly. He focuses on twisting his face towel to shreds so he doesn’t have to look up into what he knows is going to be kindness and sympathy, the sort that has always been hard to look at directly and left him aching. Xiomara whines a little, looking up at Shiori in the rafters, who looks away. 

“Heard from Ghislain you’ve been cycling,” Javi says, casual, easy, too light. Testing the waters, watching for cracks on fresh ice. “Like a madman.”

“Cycling,” Yuzuru repeats, not quite able to wrap his tongue around each distinct syllable. His legs are tired already. “Not skating.”

“Well. Good break every once in awhile,” Javi says, voice pitched unconvincingly cheerful. He taps his toepick on the ice as though to emphasise his point. His right foot, the right toepick.

It’s close to unbearable. 

“No Final for Javi, no skating for Javi either,” Yuzuru says before his brain can stop him. 

A pause, surprised. The silence between them solidifies, cold and brittle. 

“Yuzu, you got injured, you cannot rush this,” Javi says with the patience of someone who has _no_ idea what he’s saying. Even as the logical side of Yuzu knows he has the best intentions, the part that is the pain in Shiori’s broken wing and the pain in his own ankle snarls. _Food poisoning_. 

“Javi was careless,” he says, and regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth. 

Javi looks at him, hurt, and no small sliver of anger stealing flashing through his eyes, tightening his jawline. They’re standing under the familiar Olympic board, and he doesn’t miss the momentary flick of Javi’s eyes upwards. 

“You were too,” Javi snaps and the edge in his voice feels like finding yourself expecting the smooth carve of blades on ice and finding a hard sliver of ice instead, a stumble and whirling fall. “You _have_ a medal--” 

_And I..._

“Okay, we’re ending your session,” Brian says, clipped and weary. Chiron, his leopard daemon, steps between them and nudges Xiomara back. Shiori tucks herself even more out of the way in the rafters. “Javi, take a lunch break. You’re joining Gabby in the other rink for the afternoon, I’ll drive all of us there. Yuzu, I’m not going to make you leave but if you stay, you stay away from the ice.” 

\---

His trainer and mother go to pick his dad and sister up from the airport in fifteen inches of Canadian snow and he almost can’t bring himself to face them until they’re actually knocking on his door and then he gets up and throws himself into his sister’s arms. She pats the back of his head in that gentle way of hers and diplomatically ignores the tear stains he leaves on her nice blouse. 

They do all the requisite family things: call his cousins and extended family with new years greetings, confirm his grandparents’ tickets to Pyeongchang have arrived and Yuzuru tries not to think about their faces or them watching. It’s a kindness they don’t remark on his silence. His father gives him the latest edition of HaNEWS, earnestly printed, and he makes a note to send them thanks later. His mother cooks them a Christmas dinner and they talk about his father and sister’s jobs, his Waseda coursework, grievances against Canadian winter, the growing ridiculousness of the tabloids, ice show proposals that have come through already planned for post-Olympics which makes him want to laugh without humour. Yuzuru picks at his food and forces it down. 

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do with Pooh-san?” his sister asks, as they’re tidying up the table. 

Yuzuru looks up. He has not. There’s been no room for it. 

Saya smiles. “I thought of something.”

\---

“So it’s a cake,” Yuzuru says. A larger, fluffier cake that he expected. 

“It’s _shortcake_ ,” his sister says as she neatly chops off the Pooh figurine from the top with a pair of scissors and lays it gently next to the similarly dehomed Piglet. It’s as decisive as he’s ever seen her. Her smile is conspiratorial. “And it _is_ Pooh-san, really. I’ll make sure the tissue box has him there.”

“Thanks,” Yuzuru says. He gives real Pooh-san’s face a squeeze. 

“Dork,” Shiori says sleepily, from where she’s nestled in the ring that Kazue, his sister’s snow leopard daemon, has made with his tail. Yuzuru sticks his tongue out at her and she tosses her head and ruffles her feathers. 

“Will you bandage Shiori’s wings? It doesn’t seem right to just leave it,” Saya says, holding out a roll. “I spoke to the pet store owner and he says this is the best bandage for birds.”

Yuzuru takes it, looking at her with wide eyes. Of course she’s noticed. 

It’s hard to take Shiori’s wing in his hands, not in the least to bear her flinch as he does. He can feel the break, the limpness at the tip of her wing. She chirps softly as he rolls the bandage methodically around the joint and bumps at his hand with her head as he strokes her feathers soothingly, then nips his fingers for good measure before carefully shuffling back to Kazue to avoid stepping on the mass of fan letters on his floor. Glitter and stickers and heartfelt words, and a small mountain of presents and gifts. Saya brought along another bag from Sendai, including hand-knitted goods from the aunties he had met in the disaster recovery areas, full of neat letters in Japanese, slightly bumpy where they had pressed too hard into the paper with their biros. It feels like a soft hand on his arm, the patient, steadying feeling of their kind gazes on him in front of them, his raw, post-Sochi emotions - the part he left with the wreckage of concrete, wood, glass and water - laid bare. 

It’s been a long time since then. He feels himself smile for the first time in what feels like weeks. The sensation feels fragile, tentative. 

Saya picks up a needle to stitch the tear on the tissue box together. “Do you know what water bottle you'll be using in Pyeongchang? I need the dimensions to make the water bottle cover.”

Another ritual from Sochi, one that he had wanted to commit to, one that had seemed as important as his skates in the grips of pre-competition anxiety, ticking things off methodically in his hotel room. She knows him well. It's all starting to feel just a little less crucial, in the scheme of things. In the face of a single goal. 

“I don’t think I need them,” he says softly. He thinks about the soakers his mother had presented to him at dinner. “I’ll just use the ones I have.”

“Is that right?” his sister murmurs, knotting the last stitch. She smiles as she hands the tissue case to him, soft. “Then do your best.”

Yuzuru holds the plush fabric close. It’s warm. “Okay.”

“And do reply to Nobu-san, won’t you? He’s texting me nightly.”

\---

He does and Nobu’s spam of crying kaomojis is so long he switches off his notifications again after giving him a reply and deletes LINE for good measure. Just for now. 

\---

He meets Brian in his office at the Cricket Club soon after the new year, one that’s newly overrun with fan letters and carefully wrapped packages for him, and tells Brian about Shiori, about the painkillers.

In the fluorescent office light, he’s noticing the exhaustion lining Brian’s shoulders for the first time, the slight stoop in his posture and gingerness with which he angles himself into his chair, Chiron’s protectiveness. 

“I’m sorry Yuzu,” Brian says, and Shiori accepts Chiron’s gentle nudge against her non-injured side. “It’s been a tough time for you.”

“How’s Javi?” he asks. Brian’s hand in Chiron’s fur tightens a little for a moment, and then he lets out a breath. Yuzuru can see him searching for the right words to say, like a field general carefully marshalling his words into place, and wants to shout something, frustrated — _this isn’t Boston, this isn’t even last season, I won’t hide from you now, just be honest with me_ \- but now’s not the time or place, not after the last argument in practice led Brian to start taking Gabby and Javi to a different rink and the following argument hasn’t resolved itself yet.

“Working through it,” Brian finally says, tone clipped. The worry on his face softens slightly as he says, “He’s got some new support at home.”  
  
Ah. Yuzuru has seen the Instagram photos earlier that morning, the accompanying wrench of his gut that he can’t quite place. He had spent the next few hours putting away all his earphones and downloading twenty academic articles from the sports psychology department that he’s already color coded and tabbed for reading later. He refuses to think about it further. 

“Yuzu,” Brian says, patient. “What do you want to do?”

The answer, as always, comes immediately. “I want to win the Olympics.”

Brian looks down at his clasped hands and Shiori’s talons dig deep enough into Yuzuru’s shoulder to drawn blood. 

But when Brian looks back up at him, his eyes are clear. “Okay. We can do that. But you won’t be able to have everything.”

Yuzuru thinks, inexplicably, to the shortcake tissue cover, carefully packed in his suitcase at home. 

“Okay.”

\---

Mid-January comes in a howl of snowstorms outside the TCC windows and extra hours in the practice rink with Ghislain. He’s out of time, he’s _out_ _of time_ , but the plan is to go one step at a time, and he throws himself into that because it’s all he can do. He deletes LINE again, he privates his earphone Twitter, puts his games away and buys a subscription to five medical journals instead. 

He gets through the single jumps, gets used to the new feeling of numbness in his ankle. Ghislain gets him started on doubles four days in, and he manages to land everything except the double Axel. He manages to complete a full Step Sequence runthrough without stopping and his spins have more or less stabilised, but the Axel keeps evading him, he’s popping it or over-rotating and crashing. 

Even falling feels weird, with the new numbness in his leg. He pushes on.

\---

  
  


His jumping session with Javi is the first they’ve had for quite a while - what, with New Years and rehabilitation getting in the way - so much so that it’s almost weird to see Javi’s familiar figure as a blur in his peripheral vision. It’s not a good practice for either of them, and the frustration peaks so much that both Brian and Ghislain send them to the benches to rest. They sit, side by side, in weary, heavy silence. 

Two two-time world champions, Yuzuru thinks, exhausted.

As if reading his mind, Javi raises a tired finger above to where Yuzuru knows the plaque board is. “We’re not very world champion right now,” he says wryly. 

“Is bad,” Yuzuru agrees. He eyes Javi’s boot. “Salchow?”

Javi grimaces. “Yeah. You?”

“Everything,” Yuzu replies, dry. “Especially Axel.”

A smile attempts to pull up the side of Javi’s mouth but he mostly looks grave. Yuzu doesn’t miss the flicker of his gaze at the glass windows, where Shiori is sitting with his mother. “Shiori...?”

“No,” Yuzu says, and it closes up his throat before he can say anything else. The bandage on her wing is visible to everyone who can get close enough to look.

A pause, as Javi runs his skate guarded boots over the linoleum floor. 

“She will get better,” Javi says. 

“You can get back,” Yuzuru says quietly, and the effort that takes is surprising, the harsh grating of blades angled wrongly on the ice. "The Salchow. Everything."

“Yusu I am so _old_ ,” Javi says, half laughing but there’s an edge to his voice and Yuzu looks up at it. Xiomara shrinks a little more by Javi’s side, and on Javi’s face is the shadow of Sochi, the pain of that summer afterwards. It sometimes still shakes Yuzu to look at Javi in the eyes, knowing what he knows, what he witnessed. 

It feels like it’s been a long time since he’s hugged Javi, since he’s hugged anyone. It feels like releasing the laces and his burning, aching feet after a punishing jump session, a flood of apologies for silence, for tension, for food poisoning and shitty GP qualification rules, for Sochi, half of them for nonsensical things that isn’t anyone’s fault; he can feel Javi’s wordless surprise as the other raises his arms, one hand coming to rest on the back of Yuzu’s neck to hold him close, a familiar habit. Warm, calloused hands, gentle. Yuzuru pushes down everything else. 

“Javi _will_ ,” Yuzuru says, his voice comes out a fierce whisper and he pretends that its enough to overcome the cold kernel of _you can’t both win_ in the back of his mind. 

\---

The rest of January passes in a blur, and the constant feeling of being chased. He's almost at his old speed with spins and steps, the familiarity of Seimei and Chopin pushing him along with muscle memory when his mind is too tired to process. He follows along his diet plan, learns all the English on the dials of the machines in the rehabilitation centre. Kikuchi-san flies in to help with physical therapy. His mother reprimands him twice for falling asleep amidst a stack of articles. Withdraws from the team event and tries not to read anything, but it makes the news and he forces himself to sit through it, like touching the ice with your bare hands so the shock of the cold is no longer such a shock when you have to fall. 

There’s no room to care.

He works himself to exhaustion every night, hollowed out, so he can fall asleep without thinking. 

\---

“Just a thought,” Ghislain says, the fourth time he crashes out of his double Axel that session. He doesn't flinch away from the anger that Yuzuru lets spills over the edges, too much for him to contain nowadays. His face is thoughtful, caught in the throes of problem-solving. “Why don’t you try the triple?”

Yuzuru looks at him from the ice, dazed, tired and unable to even summon the tears of frustration he’s feeling. “What?”

“Triple Axel,” Ghislain says, skating over and bending down to help him up. He’s staring at Yuzuru’s face closely as he brushes the ice shards off Yuzuru’s arms. “You’ve got the other triples. Maybe your body will remember it too.”

Yuzuru stares at him. He’s tired. He’s only barely gotten his triple loop back. He can’t feel his ankle very well but he thinks it gives a warning twinge. But it makes sense. 

It’s late in the day, the last students of the session left an hour ago. They're alone in the rink, his mother watching behind the glass, Shiori watching from the rafters, cocking her head. “Are you sure?” she asks.

Yuzuru nods at her. He pushes down the fear, and pushes off with his blades instead, stroking around the corner to pick up speed. It feels familiar. It feels sure. 

He jumps. 

He’s fourteen and bleeding from the elbows, picking himself off the ground to try again; sixteen and on his second crossover rounding the bend at Ice Rink Sendai when the earth rips itself from under his feet; he’s seventeen in Nice, his palms smarting from the fall, Shiori screeching and flapping her wings from the board, thinking _I’m not done yet_ and launching into the takeoff he’s practised and practised above all else until he knows every angle, every muscle he needs to move; he’s nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, feeling the deep seated _knowing_ of a good landing, he’s in Boston, feeling Shiori’s horror as he wills the pain in his left foot to hold and launches into the takeoff, feels the burst of stars as he holds onto the jump that saves him. 

He is six and Tsuzuki-sensei’s wry smile looms above him. _The Axel is the king of jumps._

Lands. The bite of ice, the surety of the exit curve carving itself in an arc, lancing across the ice, the sound of Ghislain’s whoop echoing up the high rafters. His own laughter, shocked, exhilarated, feels like it’s coming from outside his body. 

His eyes are on Shiori, and the slow unfurling of her falcon wings, her delight mixing with his own.

\---

The media descends on Pyeongchang for the opening ceremony. He watches as Yuna Kim takes the stage, Olympic flame in her hands. She skates as beautifully as ever, light. The relief on her shoulders is palpable, like the last time he saw her in person all those years ago, standing illuminated by the Korean flag, LED lights shining on the Sochi gala ice. He has a sudden sense memory of trying to approach her in practice and laughs into his hands, embarrassed. 

The cauldron roars to life, flames licking out to the sky. 

He lands the quad loop that afternoon. His bags are packed. It's time.

\---

The Pyeongchang rink really is purple, almost the exact shade of his Seimei costume, as Shizuka said in her message. 

It's quiet, as volunteers dot the upper seats, with the last of the preparations in place before practices officially begin. 

He stands by the boards, Shiori on his arm. 

Breathes in the smell of the ice.

Shiori flies.

\---

**Author's Note:**

> **References**
> 
> \- Tracy Wilson and helping Yuzuru after Boston - https://yuzusorbet.tumblr.com/post/152938849872/ice-jewels-vol4-special-interview-before-start-of
> 
> \- Highly recommend watching the Road to Gold documentary which shed a lot of light on the journey to Pyeongchang (tissues mandatory) - https://blueflameforyuzu.tumblr.com/post/176435868377/eng-sub-180226-yuzuru-hanyu-road-to-the-gold
> 
> \- Also recommend the 'I'll Absolutely Win' documentary that puts you in Yuzu's mindset pre-NHK - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK_gS0QKOpI and Memories of That Day - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3vvbv1
> 
> \- The hate comments are sadly real (and worse), along with articles dismissing him from contention from many many media corners prior to Pyeongchang.
> 
> \- Javier did get food poisoning in COC, knocking him out of contention for the Grand Prix Final - https://www.facebook.com/IFSmagazine/posts/10156709302852538/
> 
> \- Takahito Mura's final performance at 2017 Japanese Nationals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2PtHlOX1nA
> 
> \- Strawberry shortcake tissue case was speculated to be this: https://twitter.com/axelsandwich/status/963013497998204929
> 
> \- HaNEWS - A real self-published newsletter created by the father of an autistic boy that Yuzuru befriended who was touched by Yuzuru's kindness shown to his son Yuuki and has been going since 2011: https://planethanyu.com/topic/535-article-hope-to-see-you-smile-again-yuzuru/
> 
> \- Yuna Kim's Olympic opening ceremony performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpR3nRvL-9Q
> 
> \- Yuna and Yuzuru at Sochi Gala practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBXbmYHmKkM
> 
> \- Yuzuru Hanyu's two winning Olympic performances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-7rZ4G1f0w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23EfsN7vEOA
> 
> \- Yuzuru and Javier at the Pyeongchang Victory Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v-GwCA-zMg
> 
> \--
> 
> A note on daemons - I've kept the descriptions vague so you can imagine them as you like because I don't want to be too prescriptive about their appearances but their names do have significance. To me, Shiori is a gyrfalcon and the name Shiori can be both masculine or feminine. As a feminine name it can be from Japanese 詩 (shi) meaning "poem" combined with 織 (ori) meaning "weave". It can also be from 栞 (shiori) meaning "bookmark" (usually feminine) or 撓 (shiori) meaning "lithe, bending" (usually masculine).


End file.
